By Representative John Campbell

My two sons are in college now. But they spent their entire K-12 scholastic careers in the Irvine Public School system. They received a very good education there. They did so because of the dedication of many educators and parents and administrators in Irvine. It was not because of any contribution emanating from that giant federal Department of Education building on Independence Avenue in Washington, DC.

Our schools are local. They are not state and they are not federal. That's how it should be. Education (and most other things for that matter) are much better managed by those closest to the effects. No one knows who are the good and bad teachers, or the good and bad programs at a school as well as the students, parents and teachers at that school. Accordingly, no one knows why things at a school are effective or going poorly, as well as those same people at that school.

So, why do we think that so much of our educational policy should be dictated deep inside a bureaucracy 2,500 miles away? The bureaucracy only 400 miles away in Sacramento is pretty ineffective. What makes us think that we can have a one-size fits all solution for the over 200,000 public schools across this nation?

Now to be fair, I understand what moved the President to establish the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program. Many schools across the country, and in California, are failing to graduate students with the basic skills necessary to get jobs. And whenever we have a problem, it seems, someone cries out for a national solution, which is what NCLB has attempted to be. But a national solution is not always appropriate. We have some police forces across the country with corrupt cops. But no one is calling for a national police agency. Many places have aging sewer systems but we don't need a federal department of local sewers to fix them. Most local problems are best handled...well, locally.

And so it should be with education. It's not like we don't have enough other things to do in Washington which are, without question, federal issues. We have the little matter of the war against Islamic Fascism, and the federal deficit, and the unsustainable Social Security and Medicare, and the problems of energy security for the future, not to mention the mess with our immigration laws. So, we could use some federal dollars or certainly federal attention on these matters if it were to be free from federal education dictates.

NCLB has been widely criticized by all ends of the education spectrum for its inability to correctly reward good school performance and help those with bad performance. Because of the inherent difficulty in establishing objective measuring systems that work across all schools in all circumstances, it probably just cannot be done. We should not be rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on this Titanic system of federal educational control. We should instead either eliminate NCLB altogether and save the money or convert it to a state block grant system so that at least we get the decisions a little closer to the school level.

This is not an abdication of federal responsibility for education any more than your city government abdicates its responsibility on the military. It is a recognition that attempts at direct federal control have not worked and we need to try something else.

I hope we do try something else and bring schools back closer to students and parents and teachers.

Congressman John Campbell represents the 48th of California. For additional information, please visit his official website at: http://campbell.house.gov/